Coyote is set to launch in the US as chief executive and co-founder Oli Farago reveals the UK-based technology platform will be opening a New York office in February.
The announcement comes hot on the heels of the proptech company’s expansion into Germany, where it signed its first local client, HIH Real Estate, in November.
Coyote will be based out of an office near Manhattan’s Bryant Park. To avoid creating “an isolated US satellite office”, Farago will split his time between London and New York, where he will work with a team of two to get the US business off the ground.
The initial goal is to have between five and seven launch clients signed up to the platform over the next three months who will come on board “with full knowledge that they are the first dedicated US clients” to help Coyote navigate the shape and nuances of the American market. Overseas growth has been part of Coyote’s overarching strategy for years but Farago concedes that scaling the business in America was not necessarily part of the platform’s original plan.
He said: “International growth was always part of the strategy but we thought we would enter more of the European markets as the idea of the US has always been quite intimidating. It was traditionally a market we knew less about, it is further away and for a long time we didn’t know many people on the ground so it felt like we would be starting from scratch.”
He added that after years visiting the US for trade shows and research missions to get under the skin of the market, it became clear that the fit was good. He attributes this in part to the platform’s origins. The firm was first developed and used by M7 Real Estate and its clients for more than eight years before it was launched commercially to the market in September 2017.
Farago said: “A lot of M7 investors are US private equity so while we built it for Europe, we actually also built the platform with a US private equity mindset. When we started to get positive feedback from US companies we decided to just go for it because if we don’t strike now we might be too late.”
Coyote’s software aims to speed up the property acquisition process and the team hopes to advance the software to include machine learning and artificial intelligence.
This article originally appeared on EGi, on Thursday 5th December 2019.
